In less than a year, HONOR has been aggressive in releasing their smartphones ranging from their entry-level HONOR X7a up to their Magic series smartphones, the powerful ones with an amazing camera inside. And now, we have the HONOR X8a. The company has been marketing this as the smartphone made for photography. So let’s test this out.
Design and hardware
One of the things that you can easily notice about the HONOR X8a is the design of the smartphone as this one has a different design from the X7a that we’ve reviewed before. The HONOR X8a features a flat design on the back which makes it less ergonomic but look more premium. But don’t worry, the smartphone is still light and easy to grip.
At the back, there’s the flat back cover as well with a sparking matte design and it does look premium. We can also see the camera module at the back that handles the triple lens camera of the smartphone and it does highlight the larger camera module of the smartphone.
Below the smartphone, the smartphone rocks a USB-C port and it supports 22.5 W Charging. Unfortunately, the smartphone doesn’t rock a headphone jack so you have to rely on wireless earbuds or use a dongle for this.
Battery life
Inside the HONOR X8a is the 4500mAh battery along with the 22.5W Fast Charging speeds. Unfortunately, it’s not as big as the one on the HONOR X7a but make no mistake because the HONOR X8a’s battery is still decent enough as we got here a battery score at PC Mark Work 3.0 Battery Test at 10 hours and 44 minutes. This is the score that we can expect from the hardware inside it and as for normal usage, I was able to last a day on the smartphone so I still appreciate that.
Display
The display of the smartphone is one of the highlights of the HONOR X8a is a 6.7-inch Full HD+ display with a 90Hz refresh rate. While the smartphone might only have an IPS panel on this one, we’re still surprised that this one comes with a pretty vivid colors on the smartphone It’s also usable under direct sunlight but not perfect but the best part about it is that the smartphone features a really thin bezels on the sides and the top with a small chin below.
Software and performance
As for the software of the HONOR X8a, this one comes with MagicUI 6.1 that is based on Android 12 which is a little bit dated and just like other HONOR smartphones, the MagicUI does have a very similar look to Huawei’s UI nonetheless, it is still user-friendly and very pleasing to the eyes.
As for the performance, the HONOR X8a features a MediaTek Helio G88 processor inside along with an up to 8GB of RAM with HONOR RAM Turbo. Basically, the smartphone is expected to come with a performance that can run the most basic apps and games on the market right now.
The HONOR X8a will perform exactly like what we can expect from an entry-level smartphone. The benchmarks will exactly show you that. Playing games on the smartphone such as PUBG Mobile is playable on the smartphone at the low settings but don’t expect a high framerate on this one.
With Call of Duty, you can definitely play it on the smartphone but as for Genshin Impact, you have to set your expectations lower
Camera
For the camera, the HONOR X8a comes with a 100MP main camera along with 5MP ultra-wide lens and also a 2MP macro lens with a 16MP front-facing camera. For a smartphone with this processor, the 100MP main camera is definitely surprising.
In our shots, we noticed that the smartphone tends to have sharper and better images. The dynamic range of the smartphone is noticeably good as well. In our shots at the yacht, we can clearly see how the smartphone was able to capture the right amount of colors for the shots and it doesn’t tend to overexpose.
The selfie camera of the smartphone is pretty good as well. While it might not be a perfect one but the details and also the skin tones were better than expected.
Verdict
The HONOR X8a might not have the best in everything but it’s definitely a jack of all trades. Almost every aspect of the smartphone of the smartphone would be just fine except for the display, which is the star of the show as we got here a really thin bezels and also a fine quality.
